Rice field

The worker in the rice field

The workers in the rice field are going home after having been planting the seedlings all morning. Two of them remain in the field and are still over there under the blazing sun. I sit on the balcony waiting for the afternoon rain that will come soon. One of the workers moves rather slowly, his legs as round as zero, the form of a circle, but still not a wheel that pushes him forward. It’s an old man; it might even be an old woman. I can hear the two workers talking from far. They make identical gestures of the hands, picking the seedlings, firmly putting them in the thick mud.

They are like the hands of a clock, the way they work, move, gesticulate; the one like the big hand, the other as the short hand. Together, they push the minutes, the hours, uninterruptedly continuing and never running out of time. Moving straight through the rice field, step by step, row of rice upon row,they turn the time around the clock. They don’t need a watch, knowing by heart the time of planting, the steps they set, the number of seedlings they plant in one morning. Their feet know the slick mud, their hands know the floating
basket with seedlings pushed back on the water, their mind knows – I don’t know. Who is the worker in the rice field? What does he think when the sun shines on his hat, mirrors in the water and the feet of the worker sink in the living mud? He is the worker of the field, the laborer of this land, the short or the big hand of the clock. He is the worker of the water, the sun, the rice, the mud, the head of
the village, of the rice community? He is the rice cutter, the carrier of the rice, the last man in the field who leaves on his bike in the late afternoon? Or does he climb the dirt path and wait till the little bus will bring him to his desa at dark where he cleans his body behind his house and gets fried rice, nasi goreng prepared by his wife, his daughter, his sister? When does he complain? Complaining to the head of the village that he is becoming old and not able to stand on his thin legs, his muscles weakened by the water, by the weight of his years, the burden he carries all his life? Who will speak up for him, the old man with the weak legs, the brittle bones, the crumbling skeleton? He loves to work in the rice field that knows his sore feet,his old hands, his weight, his thinning legs which won’t work anymore, when he leaves the field and stays at home, sitting on the floor or lying on his bed. After all those years of working in the paddy field, he can’t think or love anymore outside the rice field, his natural rhythm, his daily song. The rice field, the mud and the water, the seedlings and the basket, the sun and his weakening legs,the dark soil are his thinking, his feelings, his emotions.
They reflect his fragile body, his bony hands and hat, his mind and feelings, even his dying shadow when he goes home.In the village, the worker hears the dogs, the cicaks, the geckos, the screeching insects and the wind descending from the hills or the sea. At night, he still hears the rice field, the toads and frogs and before dark the late rice birds, the little rice thieves, which know him and sing for
him and steal the rice if there is no net and no clinking of rattles, no lines to draw and chase the birds, no yellow, pink or blue fluttering rags on bending poles in the fields. The rice field is everywhere around the worker, it is his universe of sound and light, of movement and silence, it is the beat of his heart and the song of his life. The grains of rice are the molecules of his brains, the atoms of his feelings, the kernels of his thinking, the stuff of his existence, his way of being and his connection to the earth. Every day of his life, the rice field feeds his belief that he is the rice field worker who keeps the world in his busy hands. When the rice field stops seeing him, the world slows down, the water will dry up, the mud will harden, the cock and the chicken will leave the narrow dyke,
the sun will burst. The rice field will not reflect anymore and will become opaque. At home, in the dark of house, the hands of the worker grow stiff; his legs start to tremble and quiver, putting the world in shock, his mind in disarray, slowing down and erasing his consciousness as the worker of the rice field. Outside his house and the village, the sluices of the rice field will clog and shut down, the
veins of worker will tighten and harden; his blood will clot and stop flowing. The worker of the rice field, he is dead.